THWC 396: More Stories from a Card Show

Good morning. Happy Monday. Hobby with Cage episode 396. It is June and we'll try to give you a longer episode today than 25 seconds that we gave you yesterday. You know, a little rug pull on you. But you, you know, you all kind of knew what was coming. Today's episode brought to you by Arena Club by card ladder use code Cage. Save yourself a couple bucks and buy the Philly show. Well, the victory lap had to be taken. You know, been talking about Wemby for a while. Been showing you the 1B cards. Tanya Wemby. But I mean, you know, let's give OKC some credit. I craft on a little bit about, you know, the flopping and the flopping and the flopping. It's an interesting, you know, conversation to be had about that series. You know, OKC obviously was not healthy, nowhere near as healthy as San Antonio was their number two scorer and you know, they also, you know, J Dub is, he's an all star and Mitchell, you know, was there, there, I think their number two scorer, at least in the playoffs and you know, in the, in the critical games, they didn't have those guys. I think if they're at full strength, they probably beat the Spurs. Give the spurs some credit, you know, you know, to win that series, they had to win at least one game on OKC turf. They actually won two. They lost one at home, which was, you know, the, the forced them to have to go out and win game seven. I mean, this was a do or die, you know, elimination game seven and you know, give San Antonio some credit. They went out there and, you know, the game really wasn't, I mean it was, I don't want to say it wasn't in doubt. It was a six point game, less than a minute to go. You know, okay, see with the ball, a chance to, I guess cut it to one possession. But you know, it just seemed like San Antonio had it handled pretty much from the, from the jump. I don't know what happens now. I think San Antonio is favored to win this series. I think, you know, they started off, you know, a minus 220. Knicks were, you know, the underdog. I think New York has the, the highest state sports betting handle since they legalized gambling here. So I'm sure 99.9 of the money being bet in New York is going to be bet on the Knicks because, you know, it's your home team. So that kind of carries the day. I'm pretty sure that the odds for San Antonio, they're not as favored Anymore. Yeah, people are, people are really betting. People really betting the Knicks like crazy. So also, if you go back to the beginning of the season now, it's funny, San Antonio is favored and they were one of the biggest long shots. I think they were a 50 to 1 shot. Because if you remember, even though they have Wemby and you know, Castle was the defensive player of the year last year, I mean, this is a team that was coming off of with Wemby, two pretty bad seasons. I mean, the reason why you're able to get somebody like Wemby is because you were the worst team in the league and got the number one draft pick not that long ago. So, you know, this, this kind of worst to first that they've done here, you know, it didn't really take that long. And you know, if you were a San Antonio spurs believer in the beginning of the season, you could get 50 to 1 odds. Which is almost as crazy as the fact that just a couple of weeks ago when the Knicks were down two games to one. I remember reading this when the Knicks were down two games to one. Because I was looking at, you know, Blez blood was all about the Hawks, you know, see bloods that the Hawks. The Hawks didn't win the whole thing. When the hawks were up 2:1 against the Knicks and it was game four and the Knicks was sort of like, that was like do or die, right? You know, you don't want to go down 3 1. And the Hawks had all the momentum, the Knicks, at that point in time, if you bet the Knicks to win the, the NBA championship, you got 35 to 1 odds. 35 to 1 at that point during the playoffs. And of course, we all know the Knicks haven't lost since then, right? You know, they ripped off three in a row and then two straight sweeps. So that's 11 straight. I'm gonna tell you. I put my, I put my name on this right now and you know, the Knicks, you know, series doesn't start for another two days, but I'll put my name right now. As great of a run as the Knicks are having, I think it masks a lot of problems with that lineup. You know, as great as Mitchell Robinson is, he's a fouling machine and he doesn't really, you know, play that great a center. I don't know whether or not Cat is going to be playing defense on, on Wemby. They might have Josh Hart play defense on Wemby, who knows? I mean, Alex Caruso did a decent enough job keeping him off the block. But I just think San Antonio is too fast. I think they. They're a matchup, you know, problem for them. I think Oklahoma City was a matchup problem, too. I just. I don't think that the east is anywhere near as good as the west was. And I look at the Knicks run here to the, you know, to the championship, and I think about them as the sort of Drake May. The Drake May, Jalen Brunson, you know, the Drake May New England Patriots. They just, you know, the schedule favored them last year, and they had an easy run. And, you know, when they. When they hit, you know, a good team, you know, it showed. I mean, if you could kind of cherry pick the Knicks, you know, road here, it would be a sort of halfway injured Philadelphia team that was a lower seed than them and a Cleveland team that was a lower seed than them. I mean, the Knicks found the way to get, you know, basically home field all the way through. They didn't have to play the Celtics, and the Celtics were not. Not their typical Celtics. Obviously, Tatum coming off an injury and stuff, they didn't have to play Detroit, who really matched up. I mean, Detroit killed the Knicks during the year. That was a real matchup nightmare. So to be able to play the. The teams that they played, I think the Hawks were obviously the toughest competition that they had. And they really, you know, not to take anything away from the Knicks, they've really come together, it really gelled. They've really started playing obviously very cohesive basketball. And winning 11 straight in the playoffs is, you know, that's nothing to sneeze at. But if you could have picked the path for the Knicks, the one they had is the one you would have picked. You know what I mean? So I just think the spurs are too good. I really do. I think the spurs are too good for this team, and I think the spurs are going to win. And that, you know, I mean, for collectors, for NBA collectors, for just hobbyists overall, having Wemby win a championship is like the best thing that you could have happened. It really is. It's the best thing you could have happened. People are already comparing in the show, hey, and if you get a ring under your belt. Come on now. So many great players in the league never even win a championship. It's very hard to win a championship. And, you know, you can talk about hobby darlings for the last decade. I mean, we're almost a decade into Luca now. Think about that. 2018, next season, 2017, 2027, you're gonna have 10 seasons of Luca, no championship there. You know, Luca was the hobby. Hobby darling. You know, you want to go back before him and, and talk about, like a Devin Booker. No championships. You want to go after him, you know, and you want to talk about Zion the year after. You want to talk about Anthony Edwards after that, you know, the Bank Harrows and the Kate Cunninghams and just, you know, year after year there has been a new hobby darling, and none of them have won. And Wemby has come after those guys. And if he happens to win a championship, I mean, talk about just putting a floor in, right? I mean, that puts him. He doesn't have the MVPs yet, but it puts him with one championship. Just like joker, just like SGA, just like, you know, a lot of the, the MVPs who have come before him and, you know, he's the odds on favorite to win the finals. Mvp. They haven't started playing the games yet. But, you know, you get that onto your resume and it starts to justify. I mean, I don't want to say justify the prices because some of the prices have, you know, have really flown, you know, but can you see a Prism Silver, $5,000, $6,000. Can you see his numbered stuff really selling like crazy? Wins a championship this year? 100. I wish I hadn't given you guys so many of them, which I haven't sold all of them. You know, you could see those cards really, you know, really ballooning in price. And it's an interesting. It's an interesting thing to think about, but for a hobby, that's like the best possible outcome. It's like my home's winning, you know, and you have this. The hobby, the sport, the cards for that sport are always in a better place. When you have the next guy, you have the next person, because it's great conversation. It's right. Let's compare Wemby to LeBron, LeBron to Jordan. Let's get Kobe involved in the conversation. You know, who are we going to compare Wemby to? Can he win x number of MVPs, x number of championships? And once you actually get that championship onto your belt, now you're starting to talk about, can he win more than one? And you start to put him in some rare company when that happens, especially there. All right, so that's enough Wemby. It's just, you know, you have to talk about it because we haven't done an episode really since, since San Antonio dispatched okc. I will also tell you, you know, the league is probably happy that they got Rid of Oklahoma City because Oklahoma City fast became the villain. It's funny how the league loves to do this, you know, and I'm not going to say that it's, it's fixed, you know, but it might be. But I mean, SGA was created because the league didn't like the Joker. I mean, you know, that guy was not good for press conferences, let me tell you. You know, how, how do you like win another MVP and at a championship? I just want to go play with my horses. Okay, thanks. Thanks for that. Great clip. So, you know, they built up SGA and the Thunder as the, as the, the Jokic killer. And it worked. And you know, the league really wants to be done with that guy. And you know, now you have OKC and people don't want that to be the dynasty because now it's all about the flopping, flopping, flopping. I mean, I'm, I made videos about it myself. So Wemby is like the perfect hero until, you know, next year when they want to come up with another hero and you know, they want beat Wemby down. Who knows? I guess we'll see what happens. But a little pivot here. I mean, SGA cards might be a bargain soon if people start, you know, if people start dipping on those. I mean, you want to think about it from this end, you know, the guy has won two MVPs. He's now the reigning back to back MVP, won the championship last year and you'd like to say that if his team was healthy, they probably would win a championship this year. You know, they go to game seven with, you know, the new heir apparent of Wemby and you know, you'd only play the team that's in front of you. Right. You can only beat them or lose to them. Can't complain about the Knicks. The Knicks played the schedule that was in front of them, so it just so happened that it was Philly and Cleveland. And you can't blame the Spurs. I mean, they played against an OKC team that was injured, so it's, it is what it is. But maybe, you know, I mean, Oklahoma City, it's a well run organization just like the spurs are. We'll see who they draft, we'll see what they're able to pick up. You know, I mean, you might be looking at SGA lined up again, you know, with, with Giannis on his team next year. That's going to be a fun off season. Talk about, you know, where Giannis is going to go and stuff. But let's get into it, right? That's already 10 minutes. I went to a show this weekend with my son, right off the bat, top line, a lot of PSA talk, a lot of talk about psa, what it means and, you know, squeezing the numbers, you know, getting some cards in still now, and how many of the backlog is going to be and what does it mean and is it the same as it was back in, you know, 2022? Everybody's, oh, you remember when they shut it down last time, the whole thing came crashing down. Okay, I will say this to you guys, just like I said to everybody at the show, we're in a very different time, right? The when, when PSA shut down, we also had an overall market downturn. Go look at what the S p did in 2022, you know, I mean, you know, you go for 20 up, 20 up, 20 up, you know, the two years before, two years after, and then I think it was down 18. It's like the whole market was down. It wasn't just, you know, oh, PSA closed and killed the hobby. Like everything was down. I was a down year for investments overall. And obviously that trickles into the hobby. Remember, people, you know, people do well here when everybody's doing well everywhere and everybody has, you know, you know, extra income, extra money to spend, extra money to put into this and invest in this space, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I wouldn't say that, you know, that psa, last time they closed and when the grading companies last month is exactly what's going to happen here. You know, a lot of talk about, you know, how does it impact repackers and are they going to be buying more slabs and, you know, they stock up now, you know, and I guess something to be said for that, right, you know, over the next couple of months, my answer to that is there's no shortage of slabs out there. I mean, think about it. If PSA has a 10 million backlog, that's just the stuff they didn't get to. You know, they were grading things recently, you know what I mean? You know, they were grading and churning cards out and there's a lot of money being spent. I mean, this morning the, the card ladder index came out for, for, for monthly spend. And remember, it looked like we might have been plateauing because we had two months in a row of pretty much sort of the same amount. Both records, right? We had pretty much the same amount of spend the last couple of months. And you're like, oh, are we plateauing? Are we stopping at the 600 million, we were kind of there for like March, April, May comes out with a new chart and it's $650 million in monthly volume, a new monthly all time high by about $50 million. You know, pretty, pretty crazy to see, you know, and that's across the, you know, the major indices and that doesn't even count. Like a lot of the private sales that don't go into it. That's just, you know, your ebays and your auction houses. $650 million of car transactions verified with no signs of slowing down. I guess we'll see, right? We'll see. Now that, that, you know, PSA is going to shut down, what's going to happen with June, right? Or PSA shutting down certain levels. I'm, I'm, I'm glossing over it. They're not shutting down. But that definitely was the talk of the, of the show. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of people talking about, you know, psa. I will also say this one of the grosser things about the hobby. Everybody smells like weed. Why is it, why can't you just walk through a show without, like a big cloud of. It's like, it's like the peanuts with, with what's his name, Pig Pen, with like the big dust ball where he's walking around and looks like a big, you know, cloud of dirt. Everybody walks around basically in a, just like a big cloud of weed. It's horrible. I don't know why you guys do that. Pretty terrible. But who am I? The old man, the unc get off the lawn. Right? That's that, that's me. All right, so Pokemon everywhere. That's another thing. There was Pokemon all over the place. I heard a couple of old guys, I was at the, the heritage table or a couple old guys say, I don't get it. With the hat, with the, with the Pokemon. And I'm standing there because, you know, Ian had just traded one of our cards, a Wimby, one of our wimbies, for an entire table's inventory of Pokemon cards. You know, you know, all kinds of booster boxes, ETBs, you know, you name it, the whole deal. The kid's birthday coming up, so he wanted to get some inventory of Pokemon. So, you know, you might as well trade. Why? Because we went on Saturday. Game seven was that night. And you know, it has happened now two shows in a row. People are nervous about Wemby. They're not so nervous now. You see what happened at Web, these prices afterwards. The people who, who were Able to buy from us those cards at reasonable prices. The people who were able to buy those, you know, they're all sitting pretty. A couple of them sold them at the show, a couple of them traded them at the show, but a real fun one. I mean, I just mentioned SGA as a potential buy, so I'm telling you where my brain is. Think about this for a second. I was able to trade a Wemby silver rookie, you know, prism unnumbered with like a population of 3 billion for an SGA 2018 prism rookie red numbered out of 299 PSA 10. You know, I think the pop is, I don't know, like 80 or something like that. That's. That's a great little conversation piece there about, you know, someone who's already won a couple, you know, of MVPs and the championship against the guy who may win his first championship. And the card, you know, think about the pricing on that. Right now, the silver is significantly more money than, you know, then, then, then the SGA red, which is numbered and sort of limited and, and the whole deal. So that was fun. Ian trade just to talk about that for, you know, a couple seconds more. That was fun. And it kind of, you know, is. It was a microcosm of, of. Of the overall show, right? People want to buy the sure things. You know, the, the shows now are very different. They are tables of liquidation. They, you know, they want your cards that they know they can move for 5% or 10% more than they're giving you. It really is just kind of like a, you know, the distributor model, right? Tops. Panini gives the cards, their boxes to distribute. The distributor marks it up 5 or 10 and sells it, knows they're going to sell it out. It's the exact same thing. You walk to a show, you have your, your case hits your downtowns, your kabooms, you know, your cards that you give them to these guys, they mark it off. They know there's five sales in the last month, there's 10 sales in the last week. They know they're going to get at least this for it. And they're making, you know, money. Couple bucks, 5 bucks, 10 bucks, 50 bucks volume, 100 bucks on this card, and they're just throwing it to the repackers. A car like the Wemby, which, you know, has a million sales but is going to be impacted by that game. They were all like, oh, no, can't touch it, can't touch it. You know, there's very little risk involved. Meanwhile, had they bought all those Wembies. That would have been the best uptick for them. But that's not the game that's being played at shows right now. So a lot of cards being moved, a lot of deals. I saw a lot of vintage, A lot of vintage baseball. You know, there are people at that show. Vintage baseball, vintage football. I saw a lot of people buying. A lot of people buying stuff. Stuff, which is great. And it's borne out in the number $650 million on the card ladder monthly record from May, healthy show. That's two weekends in a row shows. I don't really think there's any local shows for me in the whole month of June. I think the next show I might go to, might might be Fanatics Fest, which is good because I, I, you know, offloaded my entire inventory at this show, so I got to build it back up. Won a couple of cards last night in the Fanatics Weekly. So that was good. Not as much as I usually win, but things, you know, you know, with as healthy of a market as we have, I, I can't compete with some of you guys bidding. So there you go. I'm going to give you my prediction. I think spurs win this series in six. Sorry, Nick fans. You know, I could, I could very well be wrong here. And I know, you know, New York's gonna go crazy for this team. I am going to be 50 this year. And the Knicks have not won a championship in my lifetime. Game 7, 93, 94 season, where they lost to the Rockets in Game 7, where John Starks embarrassed himself and couldn't shoot at all, was my prom night. That was a miserable game and that was a miserable experience. And I was a huge Nick fan. I really was. As a kid. I loved the Knicks. I used to watch every game, you know, before you had the Internet and stuff. And I used to keep track on a piece of paper, like how many points Patrick Ewing had. All right, he's gonna score 30 tonight. He's gonna score 40 tonight. I track his stats with a pencil like a nerd. Watch that guy in Georgetown. Watch him come out. Was thrilled that the Knicks got him and thought we were, you know, that was our guy. And we came close a couple times. But the championship Knicks teams were before I was born. So if the Knicks actually were able to win this, you know, you're talking about a first time in my lifetime and I am not young, so that would be pretty cool. It'd be pretty cool to watch. I've seen a lot of Yankee championships I've seen some Met championships. Obviously, the Islanders have won in my lifetime. You know, the Giants have won in my lifetime. The jets just don't win. They did win, but also not in my lifetime. But for the Knicks, this would. It'll be a big thing. And New York is a Knicks. This is a Knicks town. I mean, that is. That is. I just talked about a bunch of teams there. Manhattan is the Knicks. There is no, you know, there's no. There's no other sports team right there in New York City, in New York State proper. Sure, the Yanks and the Mets are the Bronx and Queens, which are all part of the boroughs. But football, those teams, they play in New Jersey. Don't tell anybody. And there's another episode, 20 minutes, for all you mailmen out there who are listening and wanted a slightly longer episode on a Monday morning. Enjoy. I'll talk to you guys tomorrow. It's another episode, a Hobby with Cage, brought to you by Arena Club, by Card Ladder and by the Philly Show. Talk to you guys soon. Take care, everybody.